#faith thread

It would be some kind of irony for her to end up drowning. Usually Faith liked a good irony, but there wasn't much appealing about this.

She thrashed again-- if she could just get even one arm free from the sealskin, her chances would be better-- either dextrous human hands could untangle the net wrapped around her, or she could pull the skin back over her head. Even if she wasn't able to wiggle free as a seal, at least she'd be able to hold her breath longer.

But it was a human mouth that filled with seawater when another wave-- one so tiny that she wouldn't even have thought about it normally-- slapped in her face. It was a human throat that gagged against it, human lungs that ached, human eyes that burned from the salt.

The sense of unease had been there for months now. Cliche as the notion was, Faith could find no better way to describe it than as a coming storm-- it was the same sort of untraceable tension, a subtle but omnipresent pressure. It made her want to huddle and hide in the underwater caverns in the rockier parts of the coast, the way she had when she’d been a ‘newborn’ ghost and in terror of everything.

Rumors about strange encounters in the woods began to trickle into the conversations between locals; about tourists swearing up and down they’d seen something. She normally wouldn’t pay them much mind-- wild stories about ufos weren’t uncommon during the warmer months-- but some of these seemed oddly consistent. Too much so to all be the products of drunken tourist misadventures. She began to wonder.

Curiosity eventually overcame her as it often did, and she found herself wandering between trees painted silver under the moon. It was the furthest she’d ever wandered from the shore since she’d passed, and she could feel the sea calling her back-- something half like homesickness and half physical pull.

But the first glimpse of yellowish sparks among the shadows of a nearby, particularly dense copse of pine trees set off an intrigue that called louder. The yellow light was gone by the time she arrived at the spot where she’d seen it, but the lingering static in the air told her she wasn’t alone.